I have just completed some rather intense GNU Make Makefile wrangling
and I'm feeling cocky. I believe there is much to be gained and little
to be lost from transforming the kernel Make infrastructure so that a
SINGLE invocation of make is done for the entire build instead of
invoking make for each subdirectory.
If it is possible to assume GNU make is the only make we will ever need
to use to build the kernel, there are LOTs of features that can employed
to save perhaps 90% of the time to build a kernel after tiny change.
The mechanism I have been employing here in my "day job" allows the
various bits of the system to retain their own "Makefile" (although
I have chosen to rename it to "DirMake.inc"), so special make stuff
associated with a given directory is still in that directory. Each of
the DirMake.inc files is included by the intergalactic global Makefile
at the top level. Naming conventions are used to distinguish CFLAGS
for, e.g., drivers/char from those required for arch/ppc/kernel. I have
even made a simple way to use additional unique CFLAGS for building each
separate FILE.
Is anyone interested in this? If I did it and it didn't suck would you
gurus of the Linux community be inclined to use it and make it The Way
To Make The Kernel?
Please gimme some feedback so I can decide if it would be a useful use
of my time.
Alan Mimms
Packet Engines, Inc.
alan@packetengines.com
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